Gerbils ate my last post, so I’ll try again.
Why do European newscasts spend ten minutes on the world weather?
Are you sure you aren’t watching the international edition? I get CNN International here in Japan and they do worldwide weather forecasts.
What station/program do you refer to? I sssume, as scr4 does, that it’s CNN or such. When I see news here on any national German programme (or Swiss/Austrian/French which I get on cable) the weather is in large proportion national, with just an overview of European weather (sometimes including Turkey) and nothing on weather outside Europe (weather outside Europe only gets a mention when it’s of the extreme kind, and then as a news item rather than in the weather section.)
What tschild describes is pretty much typical of the domestic BBC and other British broadcasts…there’s often an overview of Europe, partly because plenty of people are travelling there each day, and mainly because that weather invariably affects ours.
I also wager that talking about the weather for 10 minutes is cheaper than sending out newsteams to do real reporting
On what odds are you basing this gamble?
The hamsters ate my original, more detailed post.
The cable system in my city includes SCOLA in its lineup of channels. SCOLA shows nightly newscasts from around the world; not The National from CBC, not BBC World, not Deutsche Welle in English, but domestic newscasts in their native language. The PAL-NTSC format conversion is terrible and video quality is awful, but the newscasts are fascinating nonetheless.
All of the foreign newscasts send five to ten minutes on weather around the world. It’s not American-style coverage of weather anomalies when they happen, such as blizzards in Buffalo or hurricanes in North Carolina; we’re talking high and low temps for places like Windhoek, Minsk and La Paz. If anything, they’re similar to the weather coverage on local newscasts in the US, only it’s worldwide.
I would expect an answer of “Americans don’t care anout world events,” but I find it hard to believe that someone in Croatia or Basque-speaking regions in Spain would really care more about the temperature and humidity in Addis Ababa than someone in the US. Besides, the remainder of the newscasts dobn’t otherwise seem to have more international news coverage than the US equivalents.
Well, they’re not showing Norwegian news then. We’ve got the same as others here have mentioned, a 5 minute look at the national forecast, with a brief overview of European weather at the end.
Partly it might be simply that watching a worldwide overview of the weather can be quite interesting. Or maybe I’m a freak 
Could you give us examples of the actual names of channels which feature these weather reports? Of the channels I have here in the UK, CNN is the only one to spend a large amount of time on world weather. All the BBC channels, ITV, Sky News, all focus mainly on British weather.
BBC World does indeed do global weather reports, but the clue is in the station’s title.
Meanwhile Euronews, which we get in Ireland, does a European weather report.
Let’s see … the last two I saw, from the Netherlands and somepleace like Croatia or Slovakia, had world weather. I remember it on others, too, but I can’t recall the places exactly. I’ve got to watch for a while longer so I can get more cites.
From what I’ve seen of the weathercasts on the regular UK only BBC, world weather is usually shown only when a particular destination is shown on the news. Reasons varying from extreme weather to world sports events being the most common reasons 